The author of this volume is teaching in a department of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies but this book is not about the art of performance. Its topic is the real life of a group of poor Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity. However, this makes the book not any less dramatic. It presents the everyday hardships and struggles of members of this Roma community, in terms of socio-economic conditions, violations of their basic human rights, and the general lack of their cultural recognition. These people make a precarious living from recycling materials from the garbage dump at the margins of a Transylvanian town. They also live in a “citizenship gap,” Ioana Szeman argues, which separates their legal entitlements and rights from their everyday experience. Since the fall of the Romanian socialist regime, Roma were recognized as a national minority, however, their everyday life is not only burdened with economic hardships, but they are also deprived of their “cultural citizenship.” Their possibility to gain recognition, experience group belonging, an express openly their cultural differences is extremely restricted. The public sphere in Romani is dominated by the hegemony of “monoethnic nationalism” and filled with prejudiced representations of “the Gypsies.”
The key concept of the analysis is performance and the individual chapters approach different means of Roma identity performance on different the metaphorical stages of contemporary Romanian society. The author offers a complex view of how these stigmatized and discriminated citizens of Romania still can make their life bearable or even enjoyable under difficult conditions.
The first three chapters of the book, which form part one, introduces the reader to stages like a cultural fair organized in the courtyard of a museum, a garbage dump where the poor Roma live, and a training course aiming at social activists and local developers organized by an NGO. Performing Roma identity on these stages is rather challenging, since even if ethnic identity is perceived positively in the case of the fair and in NGO training, benevolent actors still reproduce unwillingly stereotypical representations and expectations to which most real-life Roma communities, like the one we encounter at the margins of the town, do not fit. These unrealistic expectations of “authenticity” on the part of the museum visitors or developers can lead to the rather disappointing and oppressing conclusion that poor Roma do not have culture at all. These paradoxical situations are critically analyzed by the author, relying on a broad understanding of culture and performance.
The second part of the book focuses more strictly on what one could call “staged cultural performances.” We encounter Roma in the dancehall (Chapter 4), in soap-operas aired by commercial TV (Chapter 5), or even in the Eurovision Song Contest (Chapter 6). While these stages are also saturated with stereotypical representations of “Gypsies,” there is still some room for self-expression. The example of the ethnically-mixed dance group Together, whose repertoire, ranging from local Roma dances to a Boollywood-style show opens the discussion that dancers are not passively reproducing oppressive stereotypes but creating their own interpretation. While the dance group enters the domain of exotic “Gypsy chic” consumed by the majority of the dancers, their community can also experience a sense of belonging not only locally but also in part of an imagined diaspora community. Soap operas exploit “Gypsy chic” to the extreme for general consumption, but there is some room for local interpretation and self-reflection from members of the local Roma community.
The book concludes with a dual call for reform in the domain of cultural production: the state and European institutions should support Roma cultural performance, and monoethnic national histories need to be revised in order to include Roma (166). After more than a decade of EU membership for Romania, this call remains unfulfilled. The institutionalization of Roma culture at the European level (for example the creation of the Digital Archive of the Roma or the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture) show that the ideas proposed by this conclusion are worth revisiting in the near future.
The volume is written in an accessible prose and the concepts used are introduced carefully, therefore the contribution of this book can be valuable for readers in different disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, in particular those interested in empirically-based cultural analyses of east European Roma or those willing to contemplate issues of the cultural recognition of subaltern populations on the ethicized, nationalized, and globalized cultural scenes through this analysis that uses the angle of performance studies.
